The FBI points out that many gangs, especially the bikers, actively recruit members with military training and advise young members with no criminal record to join the service for weapon access and combat experience.

The long term impact of this should be considered although this report has already been criticized for printing that fans of Insane Clown Posse are a criminal gang.

The FBI Announces Gangs Have Infiltrated Every Branch Of The Military - Business Insider

The linked infographic provides an interesting comparison between activists in OWS and the Tea Party.

Occupy Wall Street vs Tea Party | The Big Picture

In March, MAKE's Phil Torrone argued that libraries should retool to become hackerspaces. The Fayetteville Free Library in Fayetteville, NY is doing just that.

What a brilliant and hopeful idea.

Library builds a hackerspace - Boing Boing

Samuel Alito says what we've all been thinking:

You know, I don’t know what society expects, and I think it’s changing. Technology is changing people’s expectations of privacy. Suppose we look forward 10 years, and maybe 10 years from now, 90 percent of the population will be using social networking sites and they will have on average 500 friends and they will have allowed their friends to monitor their location 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, through the use of their cell phones. Then — what would the expectation of privacy be then?

I don't think its logical to conclude that its OK for the police to install a tracker on your person without a warrant just because lots of people do so willingly, but there is a stronger argument that the police might not need a warrant to access data if you are one of the ones who has done so willingly. I think the key question is how widely you're sharing that data.

There are some odd moments in the linked article. It says:

The Supreme Court first created the standard of “reasonableness” in the context of the Fourth Amendment in 1967.

That is simply not correct.

Also it includes a quote from Scalia which is so bizarre that I suspect that it could not accurately reflect what was said in the court room:

Justice Antonin Scalia replied moments later that the police “can do a lot of stuff that is unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment.”

No, they can't. That is pretty much the whole point of the 4th Amendment. I think Scalia knows that.

Supreme Court, Help! My Mini-Bar Is Spying Without Warrants | Threat Level | Wired.com

Voters in dozens of cities and towns across Georgia have struck down long-standing rules against Sunday alcohol sales, leaving just two other states in the nation with similar bans intact.

In Atlanta, Fulton County Board of Elections spokesman Mark Henderson said unofficial results from Tuesday’s vote show the measure passed with 81 percent support.

Finally.

The existence of this rule in this state for so long in spite of overwhelming opposition from the vast majority of the people who live here is a perfect example of the tremendous influence that lobbyists and special interests have in the state legislature.

Voters in Atlanta, many Ga. cities OK Sunday alcohol sales; only 2 states still have ban - The Washington Post

Wall Street has its own version: Its Big Lie is that banks and investment houses are merely victims of the crash. You see, the entire boom and bust was caused by misguided government policies. It was not irresponsible lending or derivative or excess leverage or misguided compensation packages, but rather long-standing housing policies that were at fault.

What caused the financial crisis? The Big Lie goes viral - The Washington Post

Sophie Windsor Clive:

A chance encounter and shared moment with one of nature's greatest and most fleeting phenomena.

Michiru Hoshino:

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

From the archive:

Three-dimensional mapping of starling flocks could shed light not only on the birds' collective behavior but also on a broad range of other aggregate systems.

Freeman Dyson:

I happen to be a frog, but many of my best friends are birds.

Jonathan Franzen in The New Yorker:

Masafuera, in the South Pacific, five hundred miles off the coast of central Chile, is a forbiddingly vertical volcanic island, seven miles long and four miles wide, that is populated by millions of seabirds and thousands of fur seals but is devoid of people, except in the warmer months, when a handful of fishermen come out to catch lobsters.

Murmuration

I’ve been tracking Pinterest for a while now and, to me, the single most important aspect of the site is that it has deeply tapped into an important shift in consumer and purchasing behavior. As we make a decision to search for or buy something online, we are trained to go to Google (or Amazon), search by keyword, and sort through results to eventually make a transaction. In return for that sorting, Google charges for advertising, but in order for it to work, we users have to signal our intent: “Red Nike running sneakers.” But, how did I decide to want these red running shoes in the first place? While Google makes money at the bottom of this decision funnel, the top of the funnel is where “discovery” happens. It’s much wider at the top of the funnel, and harder to pin down where the thoughts originate (pun intended).

The Rise Of Pinterest And The Shift From Search To Discovery | TechCrunch

"In August, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), invited analysts to submit proposals on the research applications of social media to strategic communication. DARPA planned on shelling out $42 million in funding for "memetrackers" to develop "innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science, devices, or systems."

DARPA has $42 million for memetrackers

During the meal, I met a boy named Tariq Aziz. He was 16. As we ate, the stern, bearded faces all around me slowly melted into smiles. Tariq smiled much sooner; he was too young to boast much facial hair, and too young to have learned to hate....

On Monday, he was killed by a C.I.A. drone strike, along with his 12-year-old cousin, Waheed Khan. The two of them had been dispatched, with Tariq driving, to pick up their aunt and bring her home to the village of Norak, when their short lives were ended by a Hellfire missile...

Tariq’s extended family, so recently hoping to be our allies for peace, has now been ripped apart by an American missile — most likely making any effort we make at reconciliation futile.

More here...

In Pakistan, Drones Kill Our Innocent Allies - NYTimes.com